Aaron Lee Tasjan’s version of outsider-ism began as a 13-year-old, when his family moved from California to Ohio. It turned out to be the first of many times he’s used music to bridge a gap between folks who seemingly had little in common, and it’s one of the stories found on his latest album, Get Over It, Underdog. For this record, though, music nearly abandoned Tasjan, returning just when he needed it most.
That Ohio story, “Ballad of an East Canton Lowlife,” falls smack-dab in the middle of Get Over It, Underdog, but serves to reintroduce us to Tasjan a bit, even a half-dozen albums in, as, well, a bit of a teenage misfit – “Born a white boy/I don’t know why/I was raised up to never even try” – even as he knows, as he proves a moment later…
Category: indie-folk
Slow Magic is the second album by Sailing Stones, alter ego of the Irish-born and Bristol-based singer-songwriter Jenny Lindfors, arriving six years after the debut Polymnia — released in 2020, the very year her daughter was born.
The record explores the rising tide of physical, psychological, and emotional changes that come with motherhood, blending together moments of beauty, rage, heartache, and exhaustion into a woozy psych folk swirl.
…It is both musically and lyrically built around the subject of matrescence, the transitions and major life changes a woman goes through at the time of bringing new life into the world. Which is not to say that only half the population will relate to this collection; it is a universal moment…
Over the course of his career, Will Sheff has released 10 albums that have given the frontman of esteemed indie rock band Okkervil River a reputation as one of the greatest working songwriters in the country.
As Sheff and his shifting lineup of players have traveled the world many times over, they’ve made fans ranging from Lou Reed to Barack Obama. Praised as one of indie-rock’s most ambitious thinkers, Sheff released his debut solo album Nothing Special in 2022 to critical acclaim. Extra Mile follows in the path of Nothing Special – patient and alive and breathing and musical. With collaborations and contributions from friends and musicians like Griff Goldsmith of Dawes, Zac Rae of Death Cab, Peter Silberman…
…features 3 bonus alternate tracks.
If you’re looking for those raucous, foot-stomping, banjo-slapping bangers in the vein of ‘The Cave’ or ‘I Will Wait’ from Mumford & Sons, you won’t really find them on their new album Prizefighter (unless you count fourth track ‘Run Together,’ which sounds suspiciously like a Mumford & Sons classic).
However, this is in no way a bad thing. While 2025’s comeback album Rushmere contained tracks with more of Mumford & Sons’ traditional musical stylings, we love that Prizefighter feels like a challenge they have not backed away from. It’s great to see them evolve their sound and even greater to hear how enthusiastic they have been about this latest album in interviews they have done, recently.
Since their 2008 debut, Luluc have been immersed in the beauties of the everyday, spellbound by the delicate majesty of nature: the view from a “small window” as 2014’s Passerby framed it.
On the duo’s latest record Sweet Thief, a river addresses a mountain, two ravens ponder where to go and an oak’s roots become a symbol of hope. Recorded after moving back to their native Australia after years in the US, Zoë Randell and Steve Hassett’s follow-up to 2023’s Diamonds is hushed and intimate, as if welcoming you into the pair’s living room, lit with the inviting glow of ’60s-inspired melodies and carpeted in soft, resonant harmonies.
The humble record tiptoes in with fingerpicked guitar and brushed percussion…
Max Knouse is so laid back he might tip over on this minimalist country folk record. The songwriter, from Oregon, sometimes tours and plays with Califone, another band that can kick haunting melody up out of the dust, but he shares none of their multi-tonal, multi-rhythmic fascination with rhythm. Drums and bass, played respectively by Ben Lumsdaine and Bailey Zick, stay present but simple, a sleepy swing in their slapping concord.
The main event, however, remains Knouse’s thready tenor and deep-in-the-pocket licks. His bent towards surreality begs comparisons with Michael Hurley. In somnolent “Like a Rocket Stage,” he contemplates an infestation of bees in his kitchen; the landlord explains they’re just looking for a hive. It’s just off reality, possibly…
Lynn Blakey was not a name that gained a great deal of traction commercially but she was an influential figure in the indie rock and alt-country scene in her home state of North Carolina where she DJ’d on college radio in the early ’80s; this was before forming Oh Ok in Athens Georgia with Michel Stipe’s sister Lynda (driven by the inspiration of seeing REM at a small local gig). She collaborated with others such as guitarist Mitch Easter in The Royal Opposition and guitarist Michael Chumbris in Glory Fountain, but her most well-known group experience was with Tres Chicas, a band formed in the late ’90s in Raleigh, NC, with Blakey, Caitlin Cary (from Whiskeytown) and Tonya Lamm (from Hazeldine). The group sang together for a few years before releasing Sweetwater in…
10 years ago, Madrid native Juana Everett decided it was time for her to make a big change, and so, she bravely crossed the Atlantic to the US, and in 2021, she realised her dream of releasing the debut solo album she had made there, the aptly titled Move On. Now she’s back with her follow-up, Past Lives in California, this time charting the years she has spent in the state and the ups and the downs she experienced along the way.
The album unfolds much like the decade-long physical and emotional journey Everett found herself taking throughout the Golden State, trying to find the place where she felt she belonged. The opener, the smooth ‘Bring Me Back’, finds her longing for a place in time more than a location itself as she wistfully remembers…
Jolene Marie is not an artist comfortable in the spotlight. With a generally private and reserved persona, she openly admits to not liking people looking at her, one of the reasons that led to her not performing her music on stage until she was in her late twenties. However, the release of her five-track EP Honey in 2023 revealed a singer-songwriter of immense promise, creating a steady groundswell of interest amongst both critics and the americana music community. Now, having teamed up with producer Brock Geiger, Marie has released Sun Creek, her debut album written over four months of diligent songcraft.
The opening track ‘Two Hands Together’ quickly sets the musical landscape, minimalistic and intimate, with subtle splashes of…
…Nixon Boyd hails from Ontario and has been playing in the indie rock band Hollerado since 2007. Hollerado make a much different brand of indie rock than Boyd’s solo stuff — infectious anthems laced with power-pop ecstasy. When Boyd was almost finished with his debut solo album Every Time We Turn a Corner, the bag with the hard drives containing the album was stolen from his car, and he started over.
…The title track, which serves as the opener, has an almost surfy atmosphere to it, à la Mac DeMarco at his calmest. As with “You Will Always Get Away with It,” the irresistibility is in the repetition of the refrain, which in this case is just the words of the song/album title. But he draws out the phrase by repeating the word “turn”…
Broadside Hacks have quickly established themselves as the UK’s premier folk conglomerate. As a London-based promotion company, they’ve hosted some of the most innovative darlings on the contemporary scene. They’ve also been doing the Heimlich on some classic albums – arranging star-studded presentations of Mike and Lal Waterson’s masterpiece ‘Bright Phoebus’ and Mark Fry’s ‘Dreaming of Alice’, as well as retrospectives of the music of Martin Carthy and Incredible String Band in some of the capital’s most glittering venues. They also find time to run a record label that houses some of the more gleefully weird trad artists in the UK (Milkweed, Goblin Band, Spitzer Space Telescope et al). Tinderbox, the debut album by Bristol-based multi-instrumentalist…
Key to World Peace, the second album by Australian musician Sam Perry, aka Prophetic Justice Ministry, is an odd bird: Sometimes it rattles and churns, synth and drum machine scraping up against each other like ungreased pistons; at other points, it floats like fog, sounding a little like the creeping, elegant scores of Angelo Badalamenti. It frequently feels like a DIY folk record, not least when Perry, who was raised in New Zealand, faithfully covers Lana Del Rey’s “Mariners Apartment Complex” with a distinct Kiwi lilt. Uniting these decidedly disparate moods is a keen sense of atmosphere: Key to World Peace sounds like it was recorded live in some kind of emptied swimming pool, Perry standing at one end and his recording equipment at the other. The resulting…
Recorded live in April 2025, Vol. 2 – Transmissions West joins Vol. 1 – Transmissions East for a complete record of the two incredible nights spent in Berlin’s Funkhaus.
Don+t Settle is a studio album, yet recorded in front of a live audience. Looking both forward and back, East and West, it’s a retrospective of sorts that showcases some of Glen’s best loved songs and encapsulates the energy Glen is known for as a performer.
“I’ve always been more comfortable on stage than in a studio. I love making records. I love the proces But the song lives before an audience. A song needs witnesses. It’s where I feel like I can really grab hold of it. And know it – the way that it’s meant to be known.
There is something subtly captivating about Panacea. It’s an album that’s presence isn’t marked by booming choruses and dramatic highs. Instead, Dutch artist Celine Cairo built its impact through a sense of patience. The more time you spend with it – really listening – the more its subtleties begin to surface. It’s fueled by the kind of connection that lingers long after it ends.
At its heart, Panacea is about learning to sit with uncertainty. Rather than treating healing as an end point, Cairo explores it as something ongoing – shaped by reflection, setbacks and the quiet moments of clarity that arrive when you stop searching for them. It’s an idea that runs through every vein of the record. The beauty is that these themes never feel over-explained;…
On her previous album, Tasha was a rush of color in motion. The Chicago songwriter was fast approaching the end of a video game level and the inevitable change of map, power-ups, and co-players. She spoke then of her Saturn return — a stage of meteoric change you go through in your late twenties, when everything you know about yourself is reframed. She sang to old friends — sharing beach wine with Nina; eulogizing her late collaborator Eric Littmann — but also looked forward, asking the world: What’s next? She called the album All This and So Much More. She knew what was coming — her fourth full-length, You Are Spring!, arrives at the So Much More part.
First things first, Tasha left her native Chicago for an even bigger world — New York,…
If a title’s purpose is to illuminate an album’s themes, then The Ground Above, Beth Orton’s ninth, suggests she’s been buried alive. Listening, too, for the first time, one fears that’s exactly what’s happened. Once that gentle, languid voice ached with a mere crack on “She Cries Your Name”, and that crack, furthermore, let light in. Three decades later, it trembles and breaks on her new record’s earliest notes. Indeed, this title track initially appears so privately visceral one worries about intruding. Her moans and groans are singular, guttural, even primal, as though they’ve discovered a life of their own.
Arguably, however, Orton has rarely sounded more like herself; and deciphering these lines confirms she’s making peace with her demons,…
…Like Hoboken’s finest, Styrofoam Winos are content to operate within the underground. Rather than striving to break through to a mass audience, they’ve spent the 2020s pursuing their muse and cultivating a network of likeminded music geeks in their home base of Nashville and across the country. They’re in the music business, but also the business of community. It’s what they’ve been up to in the years since they graduated from Belmont University and began jamming after shifts together at the now-defunct J&J’s Market And Cafe.
…They’ve all logged time in the Roadhouse Band with Ryan Davis, one of the breakout stars of the indie world in recent years, who released the Winos’ self-titled debut on his stellar Sophomore Lounge label in 2021. Another big fan…
When Belgian singer-songwriter/multidisciplinary artist Camille Willemart, alias Camille Camille, sings over a fingerpicked acoustic guitar, you feel as if memories are holding onto you or you’re holding onto them. Inescapable either way. She’s an arresting folk artist — more than that, though, her songs are fey lullabies as if plucked from some forgotten century or land. Although seemingly innocuous and otherworldly, the tracks are weighed down by longing. Yearning pulls them from beneath like an anchor.
Yes, the encircling guitar strumming sounds as if Camille is retracing her thoughts or circling back around to a subject, an idea, a referent that lingers like a half-remembered dream. Indeed, it is a soporific-induced world in which…